Lillian Russell

Lillian Russell (4 December 1860-6 June 1922) was an American actress and singer who was a prominent supporter of the Eugenics movement of the early 20th century.

Biography
Helen Louise Leonard was born in Clinton, Iowa in 1860, but she grew up in Chicago, Illinois. Her parents separated when she was eighteen, and she moved to New York City with her mother. She began to perform professionally in 1879 and played roles in comic opera such as Gilbert and Sullivan works, and she married composer Edward Solomon, who was arrested for bigamy in 1886. She was the foremost singer of operettas and musical theater in the United States through the end of the 19th century, but she switched to dramatic roles after beginning to have vocal difficulties in 1904. In 1919, after several vaudeville performances, she retired from performing, and she became a newspaper columnist, a woman's suffrage activist, a popular lecturer, and one of the contributors to the passage of the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924 (taking part in a fact-finding mission to Europe in 1922 for President Warren G. Harding).